These California public schools are the worst for black students, according to a USC study

Drew Costley

Updated
8:55 am CDT, Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Students walk on the UC Berkeley campus in this Aug. 15, 2017 file photo. According to a new report from the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, the disparity in UC Berkeley's graduation rate between black undergraduate students and the overall undergraduate population between 2013-2016 was the third worst among public colleges and universities in the state at nearly 16 percent. It received one of the lowest equity index scores from the Race and Equity Center because of how it performed on several metrics aimed at measuring support for black students.

Click through to see which of California's public colleges and universities are the worst for black students, according to the report. >>>

Students walk on the UC Berkeley campus in this Aug. 15, 2017 file photo. According to a new report from the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, the disparity in UC Berkeley's

Students walk on the UC Berkeley campus in this Aug. 15, 2017 file photo. According to a new report from the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, the disparity in UC Berkeley's graduation rate between black undergraduate students and the overall undergraduate population between 2013-2016 was the third worst among public colleges and universities in the state at nearly 16 percent. It received one of the lowest equity index scores from the Race and Equity Center because of how it performed on several metrics aimed at measuring support for black students.

Click through to see which of California's public colleges and universities are the worst for black students, according to the report. >>>

Students walk on the UC Berkeley campus in this Aug. 15, 2017 file photo. According to a new report from the Race and Equity Center at the University of Southern California, the disparity in UC Berkeley's

These California public schools are the worst for black students, according to a USC study

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There was nearly a 16 percent difference between the overall graduation rate for undergraduates and the graduation rate of black undergrads at UC Berkeley from 2013-2016, according to a new report from the University of Southern California. What's more, Berkeley had the lowest "equity index score" of all the schools in the University of California system studied for the report.

But that's not the only bad news for black students at public colleges and universities around the country.

USC's Race and Equity Center released a report in late September revealing that while California public colleges and universities rank relatively high nationwide in terms of supporting its black students, the state also performs poorly on many "equity indicators" such as percentage of black students in the student body, graduation rate and black student-to-black faculty ratio.

Shaun R. Harper, the director of the Race and Equity Center, and Isaiah Simmons, a research associate with the center, wrote the report. Harper and Simmons compiled data from the Department of Education on 506 colleges and universities from around the country to see how the schools are performing in terms of representational equity, gender equity, completion equity and student-to-faculty racial ratios.

They assigned GPA-style grades to each school on those equity categories and the ratio based on each school's performance and averaged them out to create "equity index scores" on a scale of from 0-4. And then they averaged out the cumulative scores of each state's colleges and universities.

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Major findings of the report

While black people make up 14.6 percent of the 18-24 population in the U.S., they only make up 9.8 percent of full-time, degree-seeking undergrads at America's public colleges and universities

Between 2013-2016, 39.4 percent of Black students completed bachelor's degrees at public institutions within six years, compared to 50.6 percent of undergraduates overall

The ratio of black students-to-black faculty member is 42:1 nationwide, 40 of the public schools studied have no full-time black faculty and 44 percent of the public schools studied employed 10 or less black faculty members

Overall, no university in the country had an equity index score higher than 3.50 and the highest state average was Massachusetts' at 2.81. The next highest state average was Washington at 2.59, and California was third at 2.46.

"A metaphor that I think is perhaps useful here: I don't have kids, but if I did and my kid came home to me with a report card and said, 'My cumulative GPA is 2.46, but wait, dad, before you say anything about that, you should know [it's] the third highest at my school,'" Harper said. "I'm going to say to my kid, 'I don't care that it's the third highest in your school – it's a terrible GPA. I know that you can do better.'

"So in some ways, you know, California is the third best of the worst when it comes to equity for black students across the 50 states. I just want to be very, very clear here that there is no celebrating to be done about the performance of California relative to the other states."

A California school – UC San Diego – was one of three schools in the entire country that was given a 3.50 equity index score. There were just four other California schools that received an equity index score of three or higher: California State University Fresno, UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside and California State University Monterey Bay.

The report revealed that some of the universities that routinely rank highest among public schools in the state – UC Berkeley, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and UCLA – are underserving black students. Berkeley's differential for black graduation and overall graduation was the third highest in the state and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's is the fourth highest at 15.3 percent. UC Berkeley's equity index score was 2.5, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo's was 1.75 and UCLA's was 2.75.

Berkeley's 2.5 equity index score was the lowest of all of the schools in the UC system studied for this report.

UC Berkeley and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo were two of the worst performing schools in terms of underrepresentation of black students in 2016. Black students made up 1.9 percent of the student population at Berkeley, the third worst in the state, and they made up .7 percent of the student population at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which was the worst in the state.

"This report unmasks several inequities that tend to get lost when we talk in the aggregate about the goodness of a college or university, or the exceptionality of a place," Harper said.

"I have so much respect for many institutions on the California list ... and they're exceptional universities, undoubtedly so, overall in the aggregate, on particular metrics. But not when it comes to enrolling, supporting and graduating black students."

Black people between the age of 18-24, who made up 6.6 percent of California's population in 2016, were actually underrepresented in that same year at all but two of the schools studied for this report. They were overrepresented at California State University Dominguez Hills and California State University East Bay. California schools' black student-to-black faculty ratio was all over the board in the same year ranging from a 9:1 ratio at UCLA to a 55:1 ratio at California State University Chico.

CSU Chico received the state's only "F" grade for its graduation differential of 18.3 percent. California was the only state in the country to receive a single "F" grade in the USC study.

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In the Bay Area, UC Berkeley wasn't the only school that performed poorly in terms of equity for black students. All of the Bay Area schools studied in the report – San Francisco State University, Sonoma State University, CSU East Bay, San Jose State University and Berkeley – had graduation disparities between black students and the overall population of 10 percent or higher.

SF State had the lowest graduation disparity at 10.3 percent and was the closest to having a black population that was representative of how many 18-24-year-olds were in California's black population in 2016. Berkeley was the only Bay Area school that graduated more than 50 percent of its black students from 2013-2016.

Despite having the third-highest black student population of all of the public schools in California in 2016, CSU East Bay was tied for the second worst black student-to-black faculty ratio at 52:1.

On the national level, some of Harper and Simmons' major findings were staggering. For example, while black people make up 14.6 percent of the 18-24 population in the U.S., they only make up 9.8 percent of full-time, degree-seeking undergrads at America's public colleges and universities. And between 2013-2016, 39.4 percent of Black students completed bachelor's degrees at public institutions within six years, compared to 50.6 percent of undergraduates overall.

Harper, who has been studying black students in higher education for nearly 20 years, went to a public school, Albany State University in Georgia for undergraduate, but it was a historically black university, one of the few public HBCUs in the country. "My space was a very affirming space," he said. "Sure not every black person who goes there succeeds, but there's very much an expectation of success."

Even though he didn't regret going to Albany State, he admits he was envious of his high school classmates who went to bigger state schools with more name recognition. "I thought my high school classmates that were winning by getting into these big state schools. It wasn't until I started grad school at Indiana University that I began reading about black students' experiences at white schools and interacting with black undergrads at Indiana that that started to change," he said.

"I came to understand very quickly that black students who go to predominantly white schools encounter a ton of racial stress."

Since then, he's been doing research, giving speeches and working in the administration of colleges and universities around the country, and saw inequities for black students all over the place. And for the past decade, he said, he's "fantasized" about doing a study as comprehensive as the one he and Simmons just published.

"Over time as I have amassed that experience that actually these inequities were not just one-offs," he said. "They were much more systemic and they were and much more widespread." And now he has data to back up what he's been seeing for almost two decades.

Harper said that although he hopes to repeat the study again in four years, the metrics they looked at don't tell the entire story. In February 2019, the Race and Equity Center will begin studying the experiences of different racial groups on college campuses around the country through the National Assessment of Collegiate Campus Climates. He said the qualitative measures gathered through that assessment will help paint a more accurate picture of how colleges and universities are performing in terms of racial equity.

And although the data compiled by Harper and Simmons for this report paints a grim picture for black students at the United States' colleges and universities, he said he's inspired by what they found.

"Most people will find [the results] alarming and perhaps even depressing. I was inspired by them because they confirm what I've long known to be the condition of black students at many public institutions. I was inspired that finally someone was able to document these inequities in the pages of a single report and make the inequities transparent," Harper said.

"I can't tell you how many emails and phone calls I've gotten this week from black alumni of predominantly white institutions and from current students. ... There was literally a woman who called me and she was crying. She said that these data confirm for her what she had been feeling was the reality for her and other black students on her campus.

"I knew that this report would do that. I knew that it would affirm black students in some important ways and I wanted to do that."